Kickin’ Country Small Town of the Day-Centerville, SD

Know what is off the charts cool? Centerville, SD's website. They've done an awesome job. I particularly love the pics of the old photos from the town. The cover photo I used (courtesy of Centerville.com) shows two big slides that weren't going into a fancy swiming pool. Nope, it looks like they were going right into the Vermillion River. Awesome! And Wild Water West thought they had the first BIG SLIDES in South Dakota.

Just added from Dianna Olson from Facebook,

The slides are no longer there, but there were many hot afternoons spent swimming/tubing/sliding/sunning at this location.....those big black tubes were what we used, and you had to be careful to not scrape yourself with the valve stem. Fun times!!!!!!!

I remember peering into to the window of what would be our new house here in Sioux Falls with my 3 boys. It was a hot afternoon. June 23, 2003. We were up on the deck looking into the kitchen when I I got a call from work. Looked like a good evening for tornado's. So, I was off to work.

One of my other experiences with Centerville was a basketball tournament that my oldest son Jake played in. I remember taping ankles in 'the lunchroom?' just off the main gymnasium. I mentioned to one of the custodians, 'this is one of the cleanest, best maintained gyms I'd ever been in. You could see the look of pride in his eye when I said it. You could also see the look of, 'darn right, we work hard to keep it that way.'

There's nothing like a school, in the middle of town that just 'shines.' And that day this gym did. I bought a tee shirt that they were selling that day and I wore it for years. Sometimes your experience with a small town is just cool. It was 'cool' that day.

By the way, if one of the older locals could tell me, are these two pictures of the same building on Centerville's main street. It kind of looks like they could be.

Pic from Centerville.sd.com

Centervillesd.com

This also just added:

Thank you so much for featuring Centerville today! Our town has a number of great features- fishing, camping, mini golf, bowling, bike path, hiking trail, pool (with slide lol) a bottling business for a Viborg winery and a greenhouse, consignment store, mobile ice cream truck, old-fashioned bakery (with world famous Zebra donuts) and much more! Each year we have a Toilet Bowl Race and we just had a couple of people raise over $50K toward renovating our ball fields.

We really appreciate your kind words about our small town!

Janette Ellis/Finance Officer/Centerville

Oh, in checking the Centerville Website I see they also have a writer living there.

This third novel in the John DelMonico/Terri O'Brien series finds them getting involved when the Director's secretary, Mary Beth Harrington is blackmailed by a rogue Internet service provider technician. He gains entry to customer's computers by tapping into their service and installing backdoor snooper programs. Not satisfied with blackmail, he begins a murderous spree that must be stopped.

The Ebook is available for downloading at the Smashwords web site for the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader formats among others. You can also download the novel in PDF, plain text or read it online.